Welcome to Part Three of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to generate more traffic is add fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration stage of the traffic blueprint. We will show you how to configure a WordPress site to start driving new traffic automatically just by publishing fresh content on your WordPress site.
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Configuration Phase
The ability to drive more traffic to one’s website is often cited by most website owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business becoming so much more competitive, it’s worth learning about any and every opportunity you can to improve your results and performance online.
Being able to generate traffic on demand is a tremendous competitive advantage. An expertly configured website gives you a significant competitive advantage from the very beginning.
The Configuration Process Is What Makes All The Difference
There is a significant difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally set up by a website-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to understand the key difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence with online business marketing automation!
(An expertly configured site gives you a web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing process!)
Not only is more work required to build and integrate an automated online business marketing system into your website, it also takes a special kind of expertise.
To illustrate this here’s a little story.
A Semi-True Story …
All is humming along in the widget-making factory when suddenly, the machinery stops.
As no one can figure out what’s happened, the floor manager decides to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Shortly after arriving, the expert heads immediately towards the control box. After staring at the wires and circuitry for 5 minutes or so, the expert then takes out a tiny hammer from his pocket and makes a single tap near the left-hand edge of the box.
Immediately, all the machinery springs back to life.
The manager is relieved as he thanks the expert, who leaves as quickly as he had arrived.
A few days after resolving the incident, the factory manager receives an invoice for $5,000.
Feeling angry, the factory manager rings the expert. Why had he charged them so much for so little time delivering a minimal amount of work? He then requests an itemized invoice and hangs up.
The next day, an invoice statement arrives in the manager’s in-tray. Upon opening it, this is what he sees:
The main challenge most businesses face online is being able to drive visitors to their sites.
In the above story, how much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise to get things up and running again? Did the expert not have the right to demand fair compensation for years spent building up the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to assess and fix a potentially costly problem?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress website or blog fully set up and configured so all you have to do is publish content to it and search engines, social networking sites and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would you save?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of driving traffic to your site?)
Although experts often make complicated solutions look simple, it rarely turns out to be that way.
Knowing how to expertly configure a WordPress site is more than adding some pages with content and configuring some basic settings. It involves knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which plugins need to be installed for specific things to occur on your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve specific results
- Which internal and external settings need to be configured to make sure things function to plan, etc.
(Driving new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This stage of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically challenging, but it’s quite complicated. It’s not as easy as installing and configuring one or two plugins, clicking on a button or two, or configuring some settings in your dashboard area … it’s all this and so much more.
The configuration phase is a complex process that involves your web hosting server, your website or blog, and a number of third-party sites and/or online services …
(Expertly configuring your website involves more than just configuring some settings in WordPress)
If we try to flowchart the configuration process, it would look something like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the activities involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s examine these areas in more detail.
Your Web Server – Configuration
We’re not talking about the process of configuring your web-hosting account for installation purposes. What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server that affect how your site will handle web traffic …
(In the configuration phase, your server settings need to be fine-tuned for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all traffic is positive traffic. Some of the traffic your website will attract will be unwanted traffic like spam, security threats, bot-hacking attempts, etc.
This part of the configuration process, therefore, is all about evaluating your needs, planning for both good and unwanted traffic and adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This could include things like server-level spam protection and securing server files, to configuring your domain and email redirections, setting up 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like email forwarding, page error redirections, etc?)
After checking your server settings and configuring these (if required), the next step is to set up and configure various third-party sites and services.
Configuring External Web Properties
The idea behind adding external sites is that all of your content should be posted to a central location (your WordPress site) and from there, radiate outwards to other parts of your traffic system, or notify traffic-related web properties and applications.
After adding these external services to your system, content pointing back to your website will get automatically syndicated to these platforms, indexed by search engines and distributed to social sites, even to users of the platform itself. Your content and website will receive additional exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some web properties and online services will need to have accounts set up before configuring your settings to save time and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts:
Google Search Console
(Google Search Console – create a Google-friendly website)
Google Webmasters lets you inform Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for faster page indexing, and provides site owners with important data, tools, and reports about their website.
After setting up your account, the account information can be used with traffic settings and notifications in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO) and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s performance, SEO, marketing activities, sales conversions, and more, by tracking all user behavior, pages visited, keywords searched for, social media referrers, etc.
After setting up your account and site details, you can add tracking information to WordPress via a Google Analytics plugin and feed data instantly to many other applications and web properties.
Bing Webmaster Tools
(Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Webmaster Tools. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing, you can use this information with web traffic-related settings in WordPress (e.g. using plugins like Yoast SEO – see further below) and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As explained in Part Two, WordPress provides users with the option of a hosted vs self-hosted website. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress platform if you plan to build a professional online presence for your business.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides some great features, which can be accessed by a number of WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account at WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll show you how to integrate this into your web traffic generation system in Part 4 of this article series.
Social Media
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and drive new traffic to your site)
You will need to set up your various social media and social bookmarking accounts in order to configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media pages and get new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the big social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up. You don’t need to go crazy, just choose those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can post your content to lots of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Services, RSS Aggregators, Etc.
There are many online web platforms and content aggregators that can act as second-tier traffic generation sources. Some are free or provide free accounts, and some offer a range of pricing plans.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that allows you to add an RSS feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse)
RebelMouse is an aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your social feed.
There are various solutions you can add to your web traffic system. Please feel free to contact us if you need assistance exploring some of these further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
After you have configured your web server and set up external site accounts, it’s time to configure your site.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your WordPress site for traffic is to make sure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, WordPress includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress settings menu)
General Settings
Sections like Site Title and Tagline can influence your site’s SEO, search indexing, etc …
(Global Settings – General Settings)
Writing Settings
The Writing Settings area contains a powerful and often overlooked built-in traffic notification system …
(WordPress Settings – Writing Settings Section)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have specifically configured your site settings to prevent search engines from indexing your site, then your site will automatically ping the list of update services entered into the Update Services section
By default, when WordPress is installed, only one service is listed …
(Writing Settings – Update Services)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically – just add a list of update services to this section …
(You can notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by readers when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings on this page can influence traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs summaries of your post, affects how your content displays to users in RSS readers and RSS email campaigns, and could play a part in someone’s choice to explore your site further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from a partial feed, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as your traffic system is concerned, however, the most important setting here is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is ticked or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked allows WordPress to instantly ping various update services whenever a new post gets published (see Writing Settings above). Unless there is a specific reason why search engines should not visit your site, do not check this box …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Section)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to sites linked to from your content, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(WordPress Settings – Discussion Settings Section)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow your site to publish posts with SEO-friendly URLs …
(WordPress Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the options for configuring your site’s SEO-friendly URLs …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up WP permalinks, refer to this step-by-step tutorial: Configuring WordPress Permalinks
Configuring WordPress Traffic Generation Plugins
The WordPress developer community makes available thousands of plugins that help to add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your website, including traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your site for dealing with the effects of both good traffic and bad traffic. No matter what type of business you run or plan to run online and how small you think your web presence is, securing your sites is something you simply cannot ignore.
(Security Plugins stop bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress site invisible to botnet and hacker attacks.
To learn more, go here:
SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive more traffic by making your website more search engine friendly …
(Yoast SEO – WP Plugin)
A plugin like Yoast SEO (previously called WordPress SEO by Yoast) can significantly improve your SEO. When properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google and Bing to index, it also lets you specify how your content will show up in Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and GooglePlus.
Social Sharing Plugins
Allowing your visitors to share your content online can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you post great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can add social sharing features to your site easily with WordPress plugins)
You can add social sharing buttons to your website easily using WordPress plugins.
Most social plugins allow you to specify which sites visitors can share your content to, embed social buttons into your content, set up default post messages, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of followers), etc. Some plugins even allow you to ‘lock’ content which users can unlock by sharing your page.
Configuring Settings – Themes
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help improve your site’s traffic generation capabilities.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring the design and layout of your website, many themes also include options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many themes have built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of themes, adding social sharing buttons to your pages is as easy as clicking a couple of buttons to enable the function …
(Many WordPress themes provide built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Other Aspects To Consider
Last but not least in the traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be configured outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your website for an increase in traffic numbers, it’s important to plan not only how to handle good and unwanted traffic but also for all the things that can go wrong as more and more people find and begin to visit your website.
If you engage in any form of business online, it’s important that your site is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business practices online.
(Is Your Site Legally Compliant?)
We have created a detailed article about adding compliance pages to WordPress here:
Post Categories And Post Tags
WordPress tags & post categories help search engines index your website, which helps you get more traffic.
(WordPress post categories help improve traffic by allowing search engines to better understand and index your website.)
As we recommend in this article, it’s best to review and set up your site’s tags and categories during the Website Planning Phases.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the post tags and categories you have set up.
Add A Site Map
A site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external sites find your website content …
(A site map is not just great for visitors, but for web traffic too!)
An HTML site map and an XML sitemap are not the same things. Although Google will index your pages just using an XML sitemap (which plugins like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), allowing visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
404 Page – Don’t Forget This!
When visitors type in the wrong URL or click on a link pointing to a page on your site that no longer exists, they are presented with an error – page not found message …
(Default WordPress 404 Not Found page)
A 404 Not Found page can be configured to redirect confused visitors to your functional pages …
(Configuring your 404 Error Page allows you to redirect web traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 error page can be set up on your server, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to easily configure your 404 page inside your WordPress admin area.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to attract traffic is publish web content on a regular basis.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, can be quite involved and requires the configuration and integration of various elements and web properties …
(WP Traffic System – Configuration Checklist)
The kind of expertise required to perform the configuration stage of the traffic automation process can take some web developers months to learn.
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the aspects of the process that can be automated. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Three
To read more, click here:
This article is part of a comprehensive series of tutorials designed to help you learn how to grow your business online cost-effectively and drive traffic organically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven online marketing strategies.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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